I am still setting up things and currently I run Roon core on my laptop. So setup is far from perfect…
However issue is with ARC. Today I went to travel and I did download bunch of albums and was planning to play songs from Qobuz trough ARC.
I did had my computer with me so Roon core was not online.
I did start to listen one of albums what I had downloaded… ARC did complain that it can’t connect to Roon core… No worries I did know that and it still started to play my downloaded album.
However it did suddenly stopped playing. I did star song again… And same thing happened. This did happen several times and I could say it took some time between it stopped playing… It felt to me that it disconnected playback when I tried again find Roon core server.
I can’t say for sure that why this happened, but still liked to report this kind of behaviour.
I am having Android phone and it should be up to date with latest apps and patches.
Hey @Jesse_Lahtela thanks for posting here. Hoping we can help figure out what the issue was.
First of all, using ARC requires the core to be on at all times. If possible, see if you can set up your core on an always-on device. If it must be a laptop, see if you can have it plugged in and set to not fall asleep.
The issue you were reporting was trying to play downloaded music from ARC, but ARC would stop during playback?
Are you able to provide a time when this may have happened?
I am going to setup core later to dedicated server so it can be online all the time. But that will come later.
It did play some time the music and then playback stopped. App did not seem to crash, but playback just stopped. I did not get any obvious reason for it.
when I pushed play it started again, but stopped again soon.
This was on last Tuesday (18th) around 6 (am) EET time. I this it was bit over 6… So 6:10 is quite close.
This did happen to me today again.
At the morning everything went well without issues when I travelled roughly 3 hours.
Afternoon when I headed back I opened Arc again and started to play… No changes in que or anything… But it stopped quite soon.
I did notice that player widget did not pop up to my screen. When I opened app again it started to play again.
So I think ARC stopped to play on background and why I did not bring up player widget may be connected to this… Not Android app developer, but I think it did not correct switch to background run and operation.
When I closed app completely and started it again (did not force close) it worked again fine… Been playing ~2 hours without any issues.
App have been offline mode whole time and I have set on Android setting that it haves full rights to run all the time (no optimisation).
Hello I just wanted to share my feedback here; I’m also have the ARC issue where the first song of the queue will play, then when trying to switch to the next track, the poor connection error appears and nothing will play after that. This only happens on mobile data and this issue cropped up when I switched phones from a Pixel 2 to a Pixel 9. I’ve tried tailscale and port forwarding, removing the network switch between the server and router, clearing the app’s cache, signing out and in again, restarting the server, etc. Hopefully the timing of the error being when I switched phones can give the Roon devs a clue on what this issue may be
This isn’t bandwidth related, really. ARC only loads one track ahead at a time. If you are playing a song and lose cellular connection while that next track is loading, you will see these failures if there is not ample time for the next track load to be fully re-attempted. I’ve been reporting these issues for quite some time, and the ARC development team has been nice enough to reach out to me directly to see if they can learn anything from my common use cases. They have made some improvements, but there is more to be done, and it’s clear they are aware and working hard behind the scenes to improve this further.
FWIW, the reason behind the one-track-ahead has to do with streaming licensing issues, and the algorithmic choices behind how to handle that with a mixed local-and-streaming collection get difficult for what I think are obvious reasons (for instance, if the listener is shuffling a mix of local and streaming content, does it make sense to pre-download the next three local songs and skip the streaming if the Internet connection gets fouled up? What does the queue look like in this case? Etc.).
The simplest option for the near-term that I can think of that avoids all that is a capability or switch that is only available in cases where you have no streaming services connected, and that allows 3-5 tracks (maybe user-specified) to be pre-downloaded.
FWIW, it seems that these scenarios were what led to the development of ARC’s offline (downloads) mode. But I think most of us just want a buffer, and don’t want to plan all our listening choices far in advance.
